Contributing Writers

As the Trump administration expands its immigration crackdown nationwide, President Trump is simultaneously creating new pathways for wealthy noncitizens to obtain U.S. visas. Earlier this week, Trump officially launched a program allowing affluent visitors to fast-track permission to live and work in the United States. For a $1 million payment, applicants can receive a so-called Trump Gold Card, which promises to speed up U.S. residency applications “in record time.

Award-winning Palestinian reporter Mohammed Mhawish, who left Gaza last year, joins us to discuss his new piece for New York magazine about Israel’s surveillance practices. It describes how Palestinians throughout the genocide in Gaza have been watched, tracked and often killed by Israeli forces who have access to their most intimate details, including phone and text records, social relations, biometric data and more.

As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dramatically reshapes U.S. immunization policy, we speak with Dr. Fiona Havers, a former top vaccine expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who resigned in June.
Last week, Kennedy’s handpicked advisers on a federal vaccine panel voted against universal hepatitis B shots for newborns, reversing 35 years of CDC guidance that all newborns receive the vaccine within 24 hours of birth.

Palestinians were battered with rain and freezing temperatures overnight as winter storm Byron hit the Gaza Strip. Soaked tents and makeshift shelters flooded, causing some mattresses to float and improvised roofs to blow away. An 8-month-old baby girl, Rahaf Abu Jazar, died from hypothermia. Moureen Kaki, an aid worker living in Gaza, says conditions at hospitals have not improved since the announcement of the so-called ceasefire. “It is not really a ceasefire,” she says.

The acclaimed academic and writer Mahmood Mamdani speaks with Democracy Now! about the rise of his son, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. The professor cites Zohran’s “refusal to budge, to soften his critique of the state of Israel” as a critical aspect of his rise to power. “His refusal to change his stance told the electorate that this was a man of principle, that affordability was not just merely rhetoric, that he could be taken seriously at his word,” Mahmood says.

We speak with the acclaimed academic and writer Mahmood Mamdani, who has just released a new book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. Mamdani, who has taught at Columbia for decades, was raised in Uganda and first came to the United States in the 1960s to study. He and his family were later expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin’s dictatorship. The book “is about the reversal of the anti-colonial movement” in Uganda, says Mamdani.

U.S. troops seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, a major escalation that the Venezuelan government called “international piracy.” We speak with New York University professor Alejandro Velasco about the Trump administration’s intentions in the country, which has the world’s largest known oil reserves.

What are the lessons from the Montgomery bus boycott launched 70 years ago this month? The boycott, which sparked the civil rights movement, began after the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus to a white man. Historian and biographer Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs.

Nineteen-year-old Any Lucía López Belloza was detained and deported, despite a lack of removal order, when attempting to head home from Babson College in Boston to surprise her family in Texas for Thanksgiving. “This is the first arrest of its kind I’ve seen,” says her attorney, Todd C. Pomerleau, who says the student has been the victim of “character assassination.

Bruna Ferreira, a DACA recipient and mother of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, has lived in the United States since she was 6 years old, but was recently arrested by ICE in her own driveway in what her attorney, Todd Pomerleau, calls a “brazen, unconstitutional arrest, a clear violation of her rights.” Ferreira was transported to a remote detention center in Louisiana following her arrest in Massachusetts, and just released Tuesday.

Lights on 24/7. Overflowing toilets and lack of access to showers. Solitary confinement in a 2×2-foot box. These are some of the torturous conditions documented in a new report from Amnesty International investigating human rights violations at two ICE detention centers in Florida: the Krome North Service Processing Center and the Everglades Detention Facility, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Trump and his supporters.

The world’s largest conflict by scale is in Sudan, where tens of thousands have been killed and millions displaced since fighting broke out between the UAE-backed paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese military (SAF) in April 2023. Last week, the RSF attacked a kindergarten, killing over 40 children.

We speak with former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck about her new book, The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late.
“Scientists have found microplastics in our blood, our kidneys, our lungs,” says Enck. “They’ve been found in heart arteries, and if it’s attached to plaque, you have an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, premature death.

Supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal are on a 103-mile, 12-day march ending Tuesday in Frackville, Pennsylvania, where he is imprisoned at the Mahanoy state prison. The march ends on the same day Abu-Jamal was arrested in 1981 for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, for which he has always maintained his innocence.

The Trump administration is facing backlash after ending free admission at national parks on the only two federal holidays honoring Black history — Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day — while adding free entry on President Trump’s birthday, June 14. The Interior Department also announced higher entry fees for non-U.S. residents under what it calls “America-first entry fee policies.

President Donald Trump says he will be personally involved in the potential sale of Warner Bros. Discovery, with two enormous buyout offers on the table that risk further exacerbating U.S. media concentration. Netflix announced an $83 billion deal last week to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give the tech giant control of the Warner Bros. movie studio and rival streaming service HBO Max.

We speak with former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck about her new book, The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late.
“Scientists have found microplastics in our blood, our kidneys, our lungs,” says Enck. “They’ve been found in heart arteries, and if it’s attached to plaque, you have an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, premature death.

A leaked memo by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Justice Department and FBI to compile a list of groups that may be labeled “domestic terrorism” organizations based on political views related to immigration, gender and U.S. policy.

Democracy Now! speaks with Democratic Congressmember Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who says she was attacked by masked ICE agents Friday as she tried to find out more information about a raid taking place at a restaurant in her district in Tucson. Grijalva says she was pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed as she was attempting to “deescalate the situation” and conduct oversight.

Pressure is growing on the Trump administration to release video of a U.S. airstrike on September 2 that killed two men who were left shipwrecked in the Caribbean after an initial U.S. strike on their vessel killed nine people. The Trump administration claims all of the passengers on the boat were involved in drug trafficking but has offered no proof.

The U.S. military said Thursday that it blew up another boat of suspected drug smugglers, this time killing four people in the eastern Pacific. The U.S. has now killed at least 87 people in 22 strikes since September. The U.S. has not provided proof as to the vessels’ activities or the identities of those on board who were targeted, but now the family of a fisherman from Colombia has filed the first legal challenge to the military strikes.

Federal authorities are carrying out intensified operations this week in Minnesota as President Donald Trump escalates his attacks on the Somali community in the state. The administration halted green card and citizenship applications from Somalis and people from 18 other countries after last week’s fatal shooting near the White House.

A major immigration crackdown is underway in New Orleans and the surrounding areas of Louisiana, dubbed “Operation Catahoula Crunch” by the Trump administration. According to planning documents, 250 federal agents will aim to make 5,000 arrests over two months.

The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for Texas to use a gerrymandered congressional map in next year’s midterm elections that a lower court found racially discriminatory. The 6-3 ruling is another political win for President Donald Trump and his allies, who have gotten a number of favorable rulings from the justices after being stymied by lower courts.

The U.S. military said Thursday that it blew up another boat of suspected drug smugglers, this time killing four people in the eastern Pacific. The U.S. has now killed at least 87 people in 22 strikes since September. The U.S. has not provided proof as to the vessels’ activities or the identities of those on board who were targeted, but now the family of a fisherman from Colombia has filed the first legal challenge to the military strikes.

Federal authorities are carrying out intensified operations this week in Minnesota as President Donald Trump escalates his attacks on the Somali community in the state. The administration halted green card and citizenship applications from Somalis and people from 18 other countries after last week’s fatal shooting near the White House.

A major immigration crackdown is underway in New Orleans and the surrounding areas of Louisiana, dubbed “Operation Catahoula Crunch” by the Trump administration. According to planning documents, 250 federal agents will aim to make 5,000 arrests over two months.

The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for Texas to use a gerrymandered congressional map in next year’s midterm elections that a lower court found racially discriminatory. The 6-3 ruling is another political win for President Donald Trump and his allies, who have gotten a number of favorable rulings from the justices after being stymied by lower courts.

The U.S. military said Thursday that it blew up another boat of suspected drug smugglers, this time killing four people in the eastern Pacific. The U.S. has now killed at least 87 people in 22 strikes since September. The U.S. has not provided proof as to the vessels’ activities or the identities of those on board who were targeted, but now the family of a fisherman from Colombia has filed the first legal challenge to the military strikes.